


Schemes and Peach Cobblers

by Jaelijn



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Bad Cooking, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Gen, Season/Series 01, Slice of Life, or not ;)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25808767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaelijn/pseuds/Jaelijn
Summary: A desperate Vila enlists Avon's help to avoid the most dreaded of chores - cooking duty.
Relationships: Kerr Avon & Vila Restal, The Liberator Crew - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Schemes and Peach Cobblers

**Author's Note:**

> Since this fic didn't end up going into the issue of [Rebels and Fools](https://rebelsandfools.tumblr.com/) that is currently in editing, you get it on here!
> 
> Enjoy a little light-hearted early season fun.

Avon woke up to the sound of his lock disengaging and frantically scrambled for his gun before remembering that he’d left it hanging over the chair – well out of reach. A second later, his overtired brain managed to recognise the lithe shadow that slipped into his room and he remembered that there was only one person on board the _Liberator_ capable of opening his modified lock – Vila.

“What the hell are you doing?” Avon asked him, sitting up on the bed and switching on his night light.

Vila at least had the decency to jump. “Avon! Took some years off my life, you did! What are you doing here?”

“It’s _my_ cabin, if you recall. I was sleeping. What _is_ going on?”

Vila pressed a frantic finger to his lips, making a hushing sound.

Too tired, surprised and intrigued to be offended or argue, Avon fell silent, listening.

A voice sounded out in the corridor, calling Vila’s name: Blake. Then a fist started banging on Vila’s door, right next to Avon’s. “Vila! Vila, I know you’re in there. I don’t have time for this childishness!” A pause. “I will get Avon to override the lock,” Blake threatened, and Vila’s eyes grew wide with alarm. Blake banged on the door again. “Vila!”

Nobody responded, of course. Vila had backed away from Avon’s door, looking around for cover and finally cowering in place when he threatened to trip over Avon’s things in the semi-dark. Avon watched the whole thing with rising intrigue, wondering whether Blake would try to bash his door in next and what Avon would do if he did.

But Blake only knocked again on Vila’s door, then stomped off down the corridor without making true his threat of getting Avon involved. Considerate of him, given that this was Avon’s sleep period.

“All right,” Avon said when the steps had faded and Vila had unfurled from his startled crouch a little. “Blake is gone.” Avon sat up on the edge of the bed, vaguely glad that he didn’t tend to sleep nude. “Explain yourself.”

Vila released an explosive breath and flopped down on one of Avon’s chairs. “Sorry, Avon, didn’t mean to wake you – you’re not normally in!”

“‘Normally?’” Tiredness was slowly giving way to irritation. “Do you mean to tell me that you make a habit of breaking into my cabin?”

“It’s not like that!” Vila protested, though, Avon noted, he didn’t deny it outright. “Jus’ figured it was the best place to hide from Blake, and it worked, too.” A little smile of satisfaction curled around Vila’s lips, fading quickly under Avon’s stare. “Uh…”

“Why do you need to hide from Blake? Think carefully about your response, Vila, or I might deliver you to him personally.” The flash of alarm that returned to Vila’s posture and face was gratifying and Avon relaxed a little in turn.

“No, you wouldn’t, would you?” Vila swallowed. “Blake wants me to cook. It’ll end badly, Avon, I swear.”

Avon blinked. For a moment, he was certain he had misheard, but he couldn’t make the sound that had come out of Vila’s mouth fit any other word. Surely if Vila were set to lie to him, he’d have thought of something better? “You are hiding from Blake – you _break into my cabin_ to hide from Blake because he wants you on cooking duty?” he repeated, slowly and deliberately.

Vila nodded miserably. “Yes. I’ll go now; there’s no need to kick me out.”

“Wait just a moment. Why are you avoiding cooking duty?”

“Don’t give me that! You do, too!” Vila snapped with false bravado.

“Yes, because I already reprogrammed that food synthesiser twice over, I have better things to do with my time, and you do not want to eat my cooking. Why, Vila?”

“See – I can’t cook either! But Blake was setting up the new chore schedule the other day and I happened to mention my old gran’s peach cobbler recipe. Since then, Blake’s been trying to force me into it!”

“And you have so much else to do, of course.” Avon nearly laughed. “So you break in here?”

“I normally stay for a quarter of an hour, or so – just in case Blake comes ‘round again to try and catch me in the corridor.”

“To press-gang you into cooking duty.”

“Don’t laugh!” Vila protested, pouty offense rising in his expression. “You don’t know what it’s like. Everyone expects deltas to be able to cook. Service grades, right? Well, I don’t want to and I can’t, so I won’t.” Vila fell silent, and they both listened intently as steps sounded in the corridor again, and Blake, one more time, stopped at Vila’s door and knocked heavily. When there was no response, again, Blake seemed to finally give up.

Once he was gone and silence had fallen over the corridor once more, Avon sighed. “Why don’t you just tell Blake that? Surely it isn’t in his interest to have inedible meals made of limited supplies.”

“Don’t you think I tried?! Blake said everyone had to, even–” Vila cut the flow of words off, a grin spreading suddenly across his face.

Avon was not going to like this.

“Even you,” Vila crowed. “It seems like he doesn’t care what else you have to do. Now, _that_ I want to see.”

“No,” Avon said flatly.

“Yes!”

“No, Vila. Believe me, you’d rather starve.”

“This isn’t fair, you know,” Vila whined, slumping back into the chair.

“Life rarely is.”

“Blake won’t try to force _you_.”

“Oh, he can try.”

Vila raised his eyes to him, putting on his best pleading expression that had so often glanced straight off Cally. “Can’t you help me, Avon? I’d owe you one.”

Avon thought about it for a moment. A talented thief owing him a favour might be very useful… “All right. Play along, and I get you out of cooking. But you _will_ give me a hand in the repairs instead. This is not enabling your laziness.”

“All right, Avon, whatever you want; just get Blake off my back. What do I need to do?”

“Oh, nothing too strenuous. It should come quite naturally to you.”

Even knowing that it was going to happen, the alarm still went straight through Avon’s bones, pulling him brutally from a light doze – the only sleep he had been getting lately. If it hadn’t been part of the plan, Avon would happily have strangled Vila at that moment.

Avon stumbled out of bed, nearly falling over his shoes with a curse that entirely drowned in the blaring alarm. Already the sound was giving him a headache.

Out in the corridor, he met Jenna on her way to the flight deck.

“What’s going on?!” she shouted at him over the noise – or at least Avon thought that might be what she’d said.

“How should I know?!” he shouted back.

Then, the siren cut out, leaving his ears ringing, and Zen’s booming voice announced, ship wide: “Attention! There is a fire in the section designated ‘kitchen’. Automatic extinguishing could not be deployed due to crew presence. Manual attendance is required.”

“Crew presences?” Jenna echoed while Zen repeated the message. “A fire?!” She looked genuinely frazzled and alarmed. For a moment, Avon was surprised, then he remembered that fire was the spacers’ worst nightmare. Spaceships had an oxygen-rich recycled atmosphere and a lot of materials that, while not catching fire easily, where difficult to extinguish once burning because of all the electricity running through them.

The _Liberator_ was different, of course, or Avon would never have agreed to this plan.

“Someone’s down there,” he told Jenna. All he had to do was give her leave to do what she wanted to, anyway: “Get to the flight deck, I’ll take care of it.”

Predictably, Jenna raced off. Avon pivoted on his heels and headed straight for the kitchen.

He could smell the smoke two corridors down and ran into Blake right at the edge of a billowing cloud of smoke. For the first time, he wondered if they had miscalculated and clamped down sharply on a sudden flare of concern.

“What’s happening?!” Blake asked and coughed against the smoke.

“How would I know?” Avon said again.

As if on cue, Vila chose that moment to come stumbling out of the smoke, coughing heavily.

Blake caught him by the arm. “Vila! Is anyone else in there? Are you all right?”

“No one else.” Vila coughed again, waving his hand as if to disperse the smoke clouds. “I’m fine. The kitchen isn’t, though.”

Avon glanced up to the ceiling, locating the heavy blast doors. “Let’s get out of here, let Zen take care of the fire.”

“Right!” Blake immediately steered Vila out of the way. When Avon followed, the security bulkhead came down automatically, sealing the section off with a sharp hiss.

Avon thumbed a nearby communication grid. “Jenna, we’re all clear. Tell Zen to put the fire out now.”

Moments later, with Vila still coughing, the alarm finally ended, and the bulkhead slowly rose again. The air still smelled scorched, but the smoke was gone.

“The fire has been extinguished,” came Zen’s announcement, the notification of relief equally as unruffled as the alert had been.

Blake, of course, looked anything but relieved. He sighed explosively, giving Vila a sharp once-over. “Well, thank the heavens for that. What happened, Vila?!”

“It wasn’t my fault!” Vila protested immediately and entirely in character and then dissolved abruptly into coughing again.

Blake’s expression twisted in concern. “All right, to the medical unit with you. Avon– ”

“I’ll check on the damage,” Avon offered immediately, before Blake could get it into his head to assign him something else – such as sending him with Vila to medical. He needed to be in the kitchen before anyone else.

Blake nodded his thanks and led Vila away.

Avon watched them go, wondering just how much of that had been an act on Vila’s part – the smoke had been real enough, and the coughing had sounded convincing. But Vila shouldn’t have been in the smoke for more than a few moments unless they had made a mistake somehow.

Avon needed to make sure there was no evidence left of their little act of sabotage.

The kitchen was a mess, as he had known it would be. But the actual fire damage was localised, as planned. Avon wasn’t a fool – he might not be a spacer, and the _Liberator_ might not be an ordinary spaceship, but he had no interest in incapacitating the ship he was on. Avon poked around a little, just to make sure that the autorepair sensor had, in fact, been disconnected, but that there was no trace left of intentional sabotage. Then he waited for the others to come and check on the damage.

Jenna was first to arrive – concern for “her” ship driving her to investigate, no doubt. “How bad is it?”

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” Avon told her, fastidiously avoiding leaning against the smoke-blackened wall. “More smoke than anything else, I should think, but the autorepair sensor seems to be on the blink. It’ll need fixing manually. Whose idea was it to let Vila experiment in the kitchen?”

“Is that what happened?”

“Well, when I arrived Blake was pulling him from the smoke, so I really have no idea. But there was no one else down here – why don’t you ask him?” Avon added, as he spotted the returning Blake with an unhappy looking Vila in tow.

“How bad is it?” Blake asked, predictably.

“Bad enough,” Avon said and just to keep in character, rounded on Vila. “What were you trying to do, set the whole ship on fire? With people like you around, we won’t need to wait for the Federation to destroy us!”

Vila’s eyes gleamed at the challenge, but his voice was all injured affront: “I was just trying out that recipe – you know the one, Blake. How was I supposed to know everything would go up in flames?”

“Well, at least nobody was injured. Nothing too bad seems to have happened,” Blake asserted, glancing about the room.

“Nothing bad?” Avon waved a hand at the mess. “The autorepair isn’t cutting in, or haven’t you noticed? It will be at least a day’s work to make sure that sensor is working properly again. And then I’ll probably need to reset that synthesiser, _again_ , I might remind you. And it can’t wait either if you plan on eating tomorrow.” He found it easy to fake the fatigue – it wasn’t entirely non-existent, after all. “This is my sleep period, too, but I suppose I will be expected to take care of this, first. I’m warning you, Blake, I’m not doing it again. Keep Vila from trying out his recipes or find a way for us to have a fresh food supply.”

“All right, Avon, thank you,” Blake said in that peculiar tone between placating and chiding that he did so well. “You better stay out of the kitchen for now, Vila.”

Vila darted a suitably uneasy glance from Blake to Avon. “Fine by me. Shame about that cobbler, though.”

“Perhaps Avon…” Jenna began with a smirk, but Avon would not let her finish that particular thought.

“I’m fixing the synthesiser. I am not babysitting Vila’s cooking, or doing any cooking in his place. Now leave – not you, actually, Vila. You can make up for waking me by giving me a hand cleaning all this up.”

Vila grumbled and hung his head until Blake and Jenna had left. Then he perked up immediately, a grin spreading lazily over his face.

Avon didn’t grin back quite yet. “I meant what I said. You are going to help me clean this up.”

“Yes, all right, I heard you the first time. I said I would, didn’t I? I owe you one, Avon.”

“So you said.” Avon looked at the scorched machinery with a sigh. With any luck, he could get the repair circuit back online within a few hours, but he’d have to stretch out the work. As much as he enjoyed the rest of the crew thinking he could work miracles with _Liberator_ ’s machinery, it was only in his interest if all of this did not appear simple. “No more coughing?” he asked, eyeing Vila.

“Blake gave me something for it. Mind you, that was more smoke than I was expecting. Had to hide from Blake, too.”

“No lasting damage, I trust.”

“Not so’s the medical computers noticed. We make a good team, you and I.”

“Yes, well. I will go to get my tools. _You_ can start cleaning off all of this soot. Manually.”

Vila’s grin faltered. “But Avon, the autorepair’ll take care of it!”

“It’s offline, in case you hadn’t noticed, and we’ll have to spend most of the day in here. Get to work, Vila.”

Vila surveyed the kitchen sourly, then glanced back at Avon and perked up again. “Still, it beats cooking!” 


End file.
